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The Ontological Level: Revisiting 30 Years of Knowledge Representation

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Conceptual Modeling: Foundations and Applications

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 5600))

Abstract

I revisit here the motivations and the main proposal of paper I published at the 1994 Wittgenstein Symposium, entitled “The Ontological Level”, in the light of the main results achieved in the latest 30 years of Knowledge Representation, since the well known “What’s in a link?” paper by Bill Woods. I will argue that, despite the explosion of ontologies, many problems are still there, since there is no general agreement about having ontological distinctions built in the representation language, so that assumptions concerning the basic constructs of representation languages remain implicit in the mind of the knowledge engineer, and difficult to express and to share. I will recap the recent results concerning formal ontological distinctions among unary and binary relations, sketching a basic ontology of meta-level categories representation languages should be aware of, and I will discuss the role of such distinctions in the current practice of knowledge engineering.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ISTC-CNR, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, Via alla Cascata 56/C, Trento, Italy

    Nicola Guarino

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  1. Nicola Guarino
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, 08855, Piscataway, NJ, USA

    Alexander T. Borgida

  2. SRI International, Artificial Intelligence Center, 333 Ravenswood Ave, 94025, Menlo Park, CA, USA

    Vinay K. Chaudhri

  3. Dipartimento Ingegneria e Scienza dell’Informazione, University of Trento, Via Sommarive, 14, 38100, Trento, Italy

    Paolo Giorgini

  4. Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, 140 St. George Street, Toronto, M5S 3G6, Ontario, Canada

    Eric S. Yu

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Guarino, N. (2009). The Ontological Level: Revisiting 30 Years of Knowledge Representation. In: Borgida, A.T., Chaudhri, V.K., Giorgini, P., Yu, E.S. (eds) Conceptual Modeling: Foundations and Applications. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5600. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02463-4_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02463-4_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-02462-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-02463-4

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